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Personal Reflections Technology

When Spiders Attack

Rachit AgarwalA specimen from the species Stupidsiteideas Rachitus

No, my room is not under attack from spiders, and neither do I have arachnophobia, unlike certain red-haired fictional characters. However, Rach’s increasingly stupid ideas about his (hypothetical) website might have me developing RACHnophobia (n. fear of Rachits) very soon.

Anyway, after shifting to my new URL www.AnkurB.info, my biggest fear was a 4-8 week wait again for my new URLs to be indexed, like it had taken initially with my original URL. Unlike what Rach wrongly believed (even after reading The Google Story, as he himself admitted), searches are not in real-time; basically they’re ‘indexed’ into databases maintained by the top search engines. SpiderThis mining for data is done by processes called ‘spiders’, because they crawl on the Web (hope you get the connection) for information. Maybe it’s just the competitive search environment, or the fact that it’s a separate domain now (I don’t believe their trash that they give equal importance to everything), it got indexed by Yahoo! Slurp (Yahoo!’s spider, it was the first to visit), Googlebot, and the Inktomi spider (the one used by MSN Search) within a day of me changing the URL. Yes, I had submitted to them, but man was this a fast response time. Most pages might not reflect the new URL in their searches until some time though.

I have got zero PageRank (when I last checked) on my new domain, thankfully, it was not a ‘no PageRank’. It WILL take me some time to regain my PageRank and the moderately high placement I was getting on Yahoo! Search for some of my posts, but as Rach said, it’s good that I shifted now, because traffic can only grow, and it’s have been much more irritating to be off searches later on. After all, 80% of my site traffic comes through search engines.

Then, take Technorati for example. Even though I had links pointing to my old URL from a few blogs I know, it never showed those, and gave me a low rank. After getting my domain, I resubmitted – it shows no links obviously, but surprisingly, it gave me a higher rank right away after registering!

I hope my readers won’t get inconvenienced during this perioad searching for posts on my blahg, because the built-in search in the Blogger navbar, plainly, sucks. It NEVER gets anything right, simply showing loads and loads of mostly unrelated posts. That’s because it no longer works in the older Blogger did – in that, they used Google BlogSearch. Yes, sometimes, posts took time to show up, but at least they were accurate! The current navbar search works on simply looking for words in posts, not relevance. Another change for the worse in new Blogger, apart from messy feeds. What’s up with Google! People (unfairly) claim that Yahoo! destroyed GeoCities, but I say that Google has messed up Blogger after buying it from Pyra.

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Classes – My Folder

/* Copyright © 2007 Ankur Banerjee. This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 as published by the Free Software Foundation. This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details. http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/lgpl.html /

/ Classes – My Folder /

#include <iostream.h>
#include <conio.h>
#include <stdio.h>

class myfolder
{
char filename[10][25];
long totspace, usedspace, avspace;
public:
void newentry();
void
showfiles();
long retspace()
{
avspace = (totspace – usedspace) / 1000;
return avspace;
}
} file;

void myfolder :: newentry()
{
for (int i=0; i<10; i++)
{
cout<<“Enter filename for file number “<<i+1<<” : “;
gets(filename[i]);
}
do
{
cout<<“Enter total space allocated in bytes : “;
cin>>totspace;
cout<<“Enter used space in bytes : “;
cin>>usedspace;
if (totspace < usedspace)
cout<<“Total space cannot be less than used space. “
<<“Please enter again”<<endl;
} while (totspace < usedspace);
}

void myfolder :: showfiles()
{
for (int i=0; i<10; i++)
cout<<endl<<“Filename for file number “<<i+1<<” is : “
<<filename[i];
cout<<endl<<“Total space allocated in bytes is “
<<totspace<<endl
<<“Used space in bytes is “<<usedspace;
}

void main()
{
clrscr();
long res;
cout<<“Enter data for files”<<endl;
file.newentry();
cout<<endl<<“Displaying data for files”;file.showfiles();
res = file.retspace();
cout<<endl<<“Total available space in kilobytes is “
<<res<<endl;
getch();
}

/ Output */

Enter data for files
Enter filename for file number 1 : Hitchhiker’s
Enter total space allocated in bytes : 2356565
Enter used space in bytes : 1234547

Displaying data for files
Filename for file number 1 is Hitchhiker’s
Total space allocated in bytes is 2356565
Used space in bytes is 1234547
Total available space in kilobytes is 1122.018